The Blues of Arabia: The history of sawt al-khaleej
January 18, 2015 1:21 PM   Subscribe

If you climb into a taxi in Doha, capital of Qatar, and Arab music is on the driver’s radio, the station may well be 99.0, Sawt al-Khaleej, one of the most popular and powerful radio and digital streaming broadcast networks in the region. Based in Doha, its name translates to “Voice of the Gulf”—a fitting name for a network that seeks to appeal to a broad, Arabic-speaking audience with pan-Arab popular music up and down the eastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, from Kuwait to Oman.

But if you ask someone who knows the music of the eastern Arabian Peninsula about this name, you might get a puzzled response: “Which sawt al-khaleej do you mean?” Today, the influence of the 12-year-old radio network, both on the dial and at www.skr.fm, is so pervasive that for many, the words have become synonymous with Arab pop. Yet it has an older and more local meaning, one that began at sea and was popularized on land, one still played throughout the region, with local styles, though one has to search a bit to hear it: It’s a genre devotees refer to simply as “sawt”—as if to imply, “the real sawt.”
posted by standardasparagus (6 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
Wondering if this is a valid streaming site for Sawt Al-Khaleej. It's spelled a little different ("sout" instead of "sawt") and the stream is apparently coming from London, but otherwise looks legit.
posted by uosuaq at 3:23 PM on January 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


uosuaq, the English transliteration is different than that in the linked article, however the Arabic spelling matches that of the radio station mentioned. "Souwut-Al-Khaleedj"=Voice of the Gulf.

Keep in mind that there is no widely-accepted transliteration system for converting Arabic to Latin characters, and there are, in the Arabic language, several different phonemes that native English speakers do not make naturally. Thus you will see myriad different spellings in Latin characters of Arabic words and names, all attempting to approximate certain sounds which are unfamiliar to Anglophones, and none of them will be strictly speaking "incorrect".

Just an FYI.
posted by Alonzo T. Calm at 4:39 PM on January 18, 2015


That being said, it does appear that the link you provided is the same radio station mentioned in the OP, however in the sidebar of that station's site it says it started broadcasting at 100.8 FM in 2002, not at 99.0 as per the article. *shrug* Pretty close, I guess.
posted by Alonzo T. Calm at 4:57 PM on January 18, 2015


I'm at least vaguely aware of the difficulties of Arabic/English transliteration,* but you're right to point that out, Alonzo TC, and thanks for verifying the Arabic spelling. I was a little more put off by the fact that the stream itself is coming out of England. I suspect this is the real thing, though. I can't be the only person to read this post that thought "where can I stream that shit?"

*I once had a Pakistani girlfriend who obligingly bought me a few cassettes of Hindustani classical music (I'm into that stuff, okay) on one of her trips home. I remember going through the cassette labels with her (Urdu is written using the Arabic alphabet); she'd say "um, this is maybe Rogh Khomaj?" and I'd say "Raga Khamaj?" and she'd be like "yeah, that works".
posted by uosuaq at 5:00 PM on January 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


[After listening to this stream for a while, I no longer care whether it's the right one or not.]
posted by uosuaq at 7:44 PM on January 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


I've been from Saana to Wadi Dawan,
Doha to Senegal,
I've driven every kind if rig,
That's ever been made,
Kept to the back roads,
So I wouldn't get weighed...
posted by Oyéah at 8:01 PM on January 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


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